Secunia

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in man-db, which potentially can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges on a vulnerable system.

1) A boundary error in the handling of the "MANDATORY_MANPATH", "MANPATH_MAP", and "MANDB_MAP" values in the "~/.manpath" file can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by including an overly long, specially crafted value.

2) A boundary error in the handling of paths can be exploited by supplying an overly, long specially crafted path as an argument to eg. the "-M" command line parameter.

3) A boundary error in the handling of ".So" macros included in man pages linking to other pages can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by viewing a specially crafted man page.

4) A boundary error in the handling of the "MANPATH" and "PATH" environment variables can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by inserting a long, specially crafted string to the vulnerable variables.

Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities allows execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the "man" user on systems where man is installed suid "man".

The vulnerabilities reportedly exist in versions 2.4.1 and 2.4.0. Prior versions may also be affected.

Solution
Update to version 2.4.2.

Provided and/or discovered by
Vade 79

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